The Modern Jewish Condition

Alan L. Mittleman

Autonomy means to live under one's own law: to discover the norms of a
lawful life, a nomos, by or within oneself. Thus it is not, in
principle, anarchic or anomic. Autonomy and authority are, as etymology
suggests, paired concepts. Autonomy means that the self becomes its own
authority, that authority per se is conditional upon the consent of the
self. Autonomy takes self-directedness as its governing principle.

How does self-directedness come to have credibility as a moral concept?
Its origins lie perhaps in the logic of responsibility; in the
conditions under which we can attribute blame or praise to an agent. To
be fully responsible, an agent must have freely chosen his course of
action. The idea that we are responsible only if we can be said to have
chosen or consented willingly to a course of action is certainly an old
one. The great German Jewish philosopher, Hermann Cohen, attributes its
discovery to the prophet Ezekiel, who, in contradiction to the exiles'
belief that "the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth
are set on edge," asserted that every man suffers for his own sin.
Ezekiel appears to have displaced the older biblical notion that God
will punish the children for the sins of their fathers for several
subsequent generations. Blame and punishment are neither collective nor
hereditary. They are merited by individuals on a basis of personal
desert. If Cohen is correct, the concept of autonomy in the sense of
having to take responsibility for one's own destiny-of having, on one's
own, to recognize what is right and to act accordingly-is not new.

What is new is the idea that the discovery of what is right is an
idiosyncratic self-discovery. The self, as the field and the agent of
moral discovery, acquires a whole new weight. The process of the self
ratifying what it has discovered, that is, of consent, takes on a new
prominence. Thus what is new is the construction of the self now held to
be capable of aiming at an ideal of autonomy. Autonomy as an ideal
renders the relation of the autonomous self to other selves, to
community, to nature, and to divinity enormously problematic. The ethics
and the anthropology of the autonomous self represent a departure from
prior traditions of Western thought and religion.

The theme of autonomy has been of defining significance for modernity.
Indeed, the major intellectual architects of the modern project have put
the individual at the crux of their thought. Modern philosophy begins
with the individual. For Descartes, often held to be the first modern
philosopher, reality per se is discovered in self-reflection. Being
depends upon the solitary, thinking ego for its self-disclosure. The
little "I," which was at best a microcosm of a vast, created (or, for
Aristotle, eternal) macrocosm, now becomes the only open window onto the
world of being. We cannot know, hence we cannot trust in, anything that
is beyond what we can think. The little "I" has now become the arbiter
of all that is.

If premodern men and women feared such radical independence, such
excision from the context of an environing universe, moderns exult in
it. Despite all of the modern talk of loneliness and alienation, the
modern soul shrinks from attachments that are not of its own choosing.
The modern soul, as Edward Shils put it, has a dread of metaphysical
encumbrances. This dread is systematically expressed in the modern
traditions of ethical and social thought. The newly definitive
individual, stripped of constitutive attachments to primal groups and
faiths, is an arbiter not only of what is but of what ought to be.

Although autonomy is not antithetical to authority per se, it is
antithetical to traditional, heteronomous authority. Autonomy regards
claims to authority that cannot be validated by, or in principle
discovered within, the self as suspect. Traditional authority is based
on claims to a superior wisdom, to divine revelation or to the
accumulated and refined legacy of the ancestors. The modern ideal
rejects this as so much paternalism. No prophet, philosopher-king, or
historical collectivity knows better than the individual what the
individual's good is. No human arrangement affecting our lives and
destinies that does not rise from, or merit the consent of, the
individual so affected ought to exist. Furthermore, this consent is a
private matter. No one can tell us what we ought to consent to. Society
should not prescribe our good for us. Only we who know ourselves best,
as John Stuart Mill argued, can decide what is our special good. There
are as many goods as there are persons. Autonomy implies that we are
epistemic and ethical worlds unto ourselves.

Traditional authority is enfeebled by modernity because it has become
increasingly difficult to speak persuasively about the good as such: the
human good, the good of man qua man, the common good in which all humans
share. Tradition speaks about human beings in broad, species-wide
categories: for example, "It is not good for man to be alone." But what
if some humans prefer solitude to sociality? Who is to say? As the
postulate of a higher human nature lost ground, the good has been
atomized into a near infinity of particularities. The old version of a
common human nature which both Jews and Christians developed from Greek
thought during the Middle Ages, namely, that man is a thinking being
whose telos is found in the perfection of intellect which is also
communio and imitatio dei, became incredible with the rise of modern
science. The teleological universe of Aristotle was replaced by the
mechanical universe of Newton. Nature was a gigantic machine, not a
purposive process leading back and up into divinity. The heavens do not
speak the glory of God, they speak the theorems of the calculus. Without
a divinely directed, providentially purposive nature, human nature lost
its human purpose. Man came to be defined increasingly by what had
earlier been held to be his lower nature. As modernity progressed, it
was the only nature that science could know.

The "scientization" of nature, that is, the triumph of the quantitative
methods of the new physics and of the technological goal of mastery, as
well as the loss of a Judeo-Christian anthropology of man as a being
with a higher nature, not only atomized the concept of the good into an
infinity of particularities, it also shifted the concept of the right,
of justice, into a different framework. Formerly, justice was a
matter of the conformity of human institutions and practices with an
inherent natural standard: of nomos with physis where
physis was understood to strive toward the divine. Nature, in
the earlier thought, implied an immanent natural law, which linked the
mundane, the transcendent, and the human. In a more theistic key, nature
was the field in which divine providence engaged in shaping human
destiny. While these concepts of nature are not equivalent, they share a
common horizon vis-a-vis the modern one. In modernity, by contrast, talk
about justice need not appeal to a transcendent norm. What is just is
what the individual consents to.

Raising consent to the chief, or at least to a chief, criterion of
justice shifts the framework within which we understand justice from
ontology to history. Justice does not seek ontological legitimation.
Appeals to the way of things or the will of God do not matter. Even
worse, they signal antimodern reaction. What matters is the history of
the society in which institutions of justice are found. Suttee would be
intolerable for Jews and Christians, but it is more than just, one might
argue, for Hindus.

Moderns (at least those quintessential moderns, the Enlightenment
founders of the modern project) have tried to avoid such culture-
dependent relativism by positing a universal and primitive attribute of
man qua man that could replace the now enfeebled natural law: namely,
rights. Human rights are held to be culturally invariant human
possessions that guarantee basic claims to life, freedom, and dignity
for all. Yet there is no doubt that the discourse of rights derives from
the prior traditions of biblical anthropology. It is a secularized,
sanitized version of b'tselem elohim bara otam: in the image of
God He created them. Can one doubt that should this historical link
between rights and biblical monotheism be lost, rights discourse will
collapse as well? There is no reason to doubt this intuition: the
process is already well advanced. In many quarters, foremost among them
the old USSR, rights discourse was, or was thought to be, a parochial,
Western, Judeo-Christian language game. One can well imagine that an
Indian devoted to suttee would resent an argument opposed to the
practice based on rights no less than an argument based on the Bible.
Both, especially at this end of modernity, appear to be so much cultural
imperialism.

It is as if there were a law of the conservation of skepticism: that
which was designed to replace biblical faith becomes as vulnerable to
rational assault as biblical faith. Human rights are no less jeopardized
by the intellectual climate of the world that first gave them systematic
articulation than they are by governments who abuse and destroy their
citizens.

What we are exploring here is how weak claims of authority are in the
modern context. As the case of rights shows, modern reason is not able
to sustain itself. The modern project of securing a universal human
dignity irrespective of tribe, clan, race, or religion founders on its
own parochialism. Having abandoned a belief in significant natural
right, modernity sought its own anthropology of rational, enlightened
man. But such a man proved to be nothing but parochial. The enlightened,
autonomous self was nothing more or less than a European, a Western,
self. Even Germany, where the Enlightenment had originally found great
advocates, by the early nineteenth century had rejected central tenets
of Enlightenment as too French. Thus modern reason, having rejected the
old religious absolutes, tried to innovate its own absolutes only to
discover that relativity, that cultural particularity, continued to
haunt them. Without belief in revelation or in natural right we seem
necessarily to be thrown upon the shifting fashions of history. And
history, Hegel notwithstanding, is not the history of reason. History is
the struggle of wills.

The autonomous self of modernity has put will at the center. It is will,
the idiosyncratic will of the autonomous self, that chooses a course of
life, that decides what is good and right for itself. Yet what is it
that illumines the will which chooses? The once unquestioned light of
revelation grew dim. It became an or ganuz, a hidden light. In
principle, it is a light that cannot be lost in questions, only in too
certain answers. Modernity was quick to foreclose the questions and to
believe that its answers, tentative as they were, were the only answers.
Thus revelation could only illumine the self if the self still sensed
the openness of the questions: that is, if the will, in its sublime
privacy, consented to such illumination. Of course, there are always
such selves, but in modernity they sense, more than ever before, their
aloneness. To read great works of mysticism such as the Cloud of
Unknowing is to hear what the aloneness of the devout was like in a
"religious age." Yet there is a difference. That age at least
recognized the cultural salience of the contemplative. His virtuosity,
while surely not for everyone, made sense to everyone. Radical religious
seriousness, while always entailing aloneness, was a publicly
intelligible and valued phenomenon.

Modernity, however, was born in the retreat of revelation from the light
of day, from the public world. The men and women who lived revelation-
and the religious authorities that spoke in its name-became culturally
solitary voices competing for a hearing at the door of modern reason.
Thus the religious communities are no longer thought to be primal. They
are derivative, voluntary: they derive from volition. They are not
called into being by God, but by consent. Their authority, to the extent
that they have any authority, is a matter of voluntary obligation. One
consents to it within the framework of autonomy.

How does this consent work? For thinkers in the social contract
tradition such as John Locke, community, including the communities
formed in the name of revelation, arise from the decision and choice of
individual humans. We band together to secure advantages that we are
unable to secure by living singly. Community is no longer an organic and
a priori condition of our humanness, as it was for Aristotle. Man is no
longer a zoon politikon, a being for whom sociality is a
condition of soteriology, for whom community opens onto the horizons of
both virtue and transcendence-rather, he is Homo sapiens, a thinking
being who arranges his life in light of his calculations of gain and
loss. Community is made, not found. It is not the condition of our
being, but a consequence of it. Thus, the norms of community, including
the communities of revelation, bind us only insofar as we consent to
them, that is, only insofar as we continue to associate our lives with
them through choice.

Why should we consent to the norms of the social order that we ourselves
(or at least our social contracting ancestors) have allegedly made? It
seems hopelessly crude to say that we should consent to them only if in
the calculation of gains and losses we stand to gain more than we stand
to lose by the association. A horde of self-interested, calculating,
potential nomads could never amount to a society. How does one proceed
from a radical doctrine of individual autonomy to sociality, to human
solidarity? Those too, at least in sanitized, rationalized form,
constitute a modern ideal. An early answer to the problem of consent and
the origin of normative solidarity, i.e., political obligation-Locke's
answer-continued to borrow from medieval tradition. Locke did not make
consent dependent on strict and arbitrary autonomy. Rather, consent is
consent to what is right. What is right is determined by natural law. We
ought to give our consent to what is right. We ought not to consent to
what is wrong. Suicide, which Locke, for example, believes contravenes
natural law in a fundamental way, is never something one could
rightfully choose. Nor is slavery. Such consent is no consent at all.
Thus Locke, writing in a religious culture in early modern times,
heavily qualifies autonomy. A transcendent order of norms limits the
range of moral possibilities that the will to consent may select.

As modernity progresses, however, these limitations weaken. Consent is
shorn of its normative horizon and simply becomes an act of will
illumined, if at all, by tastes and preferences. This possibility was
glimpsed, or perhaps preached, by David Hume, who offered a radical
critique of the social contract tradition. He saw in consent not a
rationally informed moral act of affirmation, but a passional surrender
to inherited, irrational prescriptions. Consensual affirmation of the
authoritative norms of social life was a myth, an old wives' tale for
those who still thought that reason governs the life of man.

Kant sought to rescue autonomy and consent from Hume's bleak vision by
tying them firmly to reason. Yet for Kant, too, the authority that still
resided in Locke's natural law receded. Natural law as a source of
authority is replaced by an ideal of a self-sufficient, solitary
individual governing himself according to formulas of reason. The
lawfulness that we discover in the logic of our own moral self-
reflection is the only authority worthy of consent. Autonomous reason is
the source of its own law. If one can will a course of action-a maxim-
such that all other rational agents could also will it without self-
contradiction, then that maxim passes muster. Formal criteria of
universality, discoverable by practical reason reflecting on the
experiences of moral life, set the parameters for what is right.

Such attempts to ground or justify autonomy all return to a calculation
of gains and losses. For Locke, one has more to gain by living in
society than in the state of nature. For Kant, one has more to gain by
living under the universal moral law, discovered by individual reason,
than by living under the partial and particularistic codes imposed by an
external agency. One gains freedom, which, for Kant, appears as a kind
of summum bonum.

Yet, there are other versions of individual gain and advantage. The most
radical version, which modernity produced as a dialectical reaction to
the stress on autonomous individuality, is the nullification of
individuality altogether. Modernity offers the total absorption of the
individual into a collectivity, usually a society or nation-state, as a
putative version of a human good. Modernity has produced leviathans more
terrible than Hobbes could have imagined or approved of.

The possibility of surmounting and transcending the autonomous
individuality that modernity has itself unleashed in the form of
absorption in a collectivity strengthens in proportion to the decline of
biblical faith. The religious communities, Jews and Christians,
continued to represent a social order that claimed ontological
legitimation for itself: the Church as the body of Christ, the Jews as
the chosen people. With the retreat of the public legitimating function
of transcendence, society represented itself to itself as a more or less
immanent affair: the product of decision, choice, consent. These, as we
have seen, are relatively vulnerable grounds for social order. Given the
modern idea that society is made, not found, that the human world is a
product of volition, not nature, the way was cleared for radical
experimentation, for inventing new, rational versions of social order.
As biblical understandings of transcendence retreated, rival versions of
transcendence filled the vacuum. The state could become an ersatz
divinity offering salvation for those who sacrifice themselves to it.
The strains and terrors of modern autonomy spawned a solution that both
rejects modern autonomy and derives from it. This "solution" has not yet
run its course.

Jews and Christians, as representatives of forms of community far older
than modernity, have not a common, but a related, task: to model a way
of life, both private and public, that is demonstrably superior to both
the culture of radical autonomy and to its totalitarian antithesis. To
do this, Christians and Jews need to recover the essential lineaments of
their archetypal communities from the mass of adaptations they have made
in the course of secularization. I am unable to say precisely what this
might imply for Christians, but let me conclude with what it implies for
Jews.

Modern Judaism has been pulled between two poles: the confessional and
the national. Judaism has been constructed as nothing-but-religion and
as nothing-but-ethnicity. The nineteenth century reinvented Judaism as
the "Mosaic faith" of German or American or British Jews, and
deemphasized the national and ethnic elements implicit in the tradition.
Zionism and other secular movements, by contrast, rejected this
confessionalization of Judaism, but substituted no less modern a
construction of the ethnic and national elements. Secular peoplehood is
no less a distortion of traditional sacral peoplehood than is sacred
religion without peoplehood at all. With the success of Zionism, secular
constructions of Judaism became dominant, either marginalizing the
confessional model or creating a new form of confessionalization: Jewish
religion as a civil religious appendage to Jewish national identity.

For Jews to reach a new/old self-representation of their communal
reality entails the rediscovery of the Jewish polity. Community
is rather too weak a term to describe the sociality of the Jews. Jewish
historical being is both chosen, voluntary, consensual and
primordial, natural, and transcendent. One is born a Jew and one chooses
Judaism. Judaism is found in oneself, not made. Yet one must also make
one's Judaism, that is, one must make oneself into a Jew. The law
precedes one, yet one must make it one's own. The massive, public
otherness of the law becomes personal, intimately one's own.

The resolution of this apparent paradox has been a major concern of
modern Jewish theologians. Throughout modernity, Jewish thinkers have
been simultaneously drawn to and deeply agitated by Kant. Kant's stress
on ethics, inner purity, and on the dignity and ennoblement of man
through righteous will and action seemed like a convincing and a
compatible statement of Judaism's own ideal. Yet Kant's uncompromising
rejection of heteronomy seemed fully incompatible with Judaism's
revealed Law. Indeed, Kant called for a "euthanasia of Judaism" (Judaism
represented pure heteronomy for him) as a condition of the moral
development of mankind. Thus the Kantian version of autonomy became a
persistent challenge to modern Jewish thought.

The time has long since arrived for modern Jews to free themselves from
the Kantian dialectic of autonomy vs. heteronomy. It is a true dialectic
only if we accept its metaphysical presupposition that human beings are
or ought to be radically individuated beings; that community is
derivative, not primal; that self and other are mutually exclusive.
Judaism (and, it would seem, Kant himself-at least the Kant of the
Critique of Judgment) rejects these premises.

The primary Jewish reality is not the individual agent but the historic
polity in which the individual discovers his or her Jewishness. "Polity"
is stronger than "community" because it resonates with the sense of
obligation that characterizes the political. It entails as well a sense
of continuity, primordiality, and objectivity that community has come to
lack. On the other hand, polity must not be confused with "state" or any
other political category where the emphasis is on sovereignty and the
monopoly of legitimate violence. Polity refers to forms of social life
more binding than community yet more decentralized than the modern
state.

To belong to the Jewish polity means to live in a network of duties,
obligations, rights, and privileges that has worldwide range and
temporal depth. The ground of this order is the covenant: a binding
intimacy of a human group with God that is characterized by both love
and law. Two parties chose one another. The human party must still, in
every generation, choose. This stress on consent as a condition of
covenantal participation, that is, of life within the polity, satisfies
the modern orientation toward autonomy. On the other hand, the divine
partner clearly expects that the Jew will "choose life" and ratify, in
both an individual and a collective way, the terms of the covenant, not
the least of which is the halakhah, the Jewish way of life. The Jew
ought to consent to what is right. Consent is not directed by radical
autonomy, but by a bounded autonomy. Such autonomy is conditioned by a
vision of the human good that claims ontological legitimation. This
vision is at once both private and public. Just as the individual stood
at Sinai only as a member of the Jewish polity, so too the individual
stands before Torah today. Torah is both the law of the Jewish heart
and the constitution of the Jewish polity.

With appropriate qualifications, Christianity's understandings of polity
bear resemblance to Judaism's. The distinctions are of crucial
significance, but so are the commonalities. Jews and Christians can
moderate the excesses of the modern dialectic of autonomy by modelling
legitimate authority within their polities. Such authority is neither
sovereign nor arbitrary. It recognizes God as the only sovereign and so
circumscribes its own reach and tendency. Such authority seeks consent,
but asks that consent be illumined by a persuasive ideal of the common
good. Such authority speaks the language of rights but never without the
correlated language of obligation. Such an authority should renew our
sense of relatedness to the natural world without denigrating or
distorting the uniquely human. Here, Jews and Christians, either in
dialogue if they are willing, or by cultivating their own gardens if
they so choose, can become a nes amim, a sign for the peoples,
of a human life worthy of the name.

Alan L. Mittleman teaches in the Religion Department at Muhlenberg
College. This article is adapted from a paper prepared in February 1994
for the International Jewish-Christian Conference on Religious
Leadership in Secular Society in Jerusalem.